Everyone's A Villain
by Reincarnated Poet
Summary: Sequel to Not the Hero - Revised. Running away had never been something that she'd done well, but she was a loyal creature. When two sides of a coin were against each other, she had little choice but to drop the coin and walk away. Except that coin and the hand that held it are forever altered by having touched. Running had never been her strong suit.
1. Being the Bad Guy

AN: Unfortunately, I let Everybody's Villain sort of die, mostly because I wasn't enjoying the writing style or the plot line that I'd made for it. I took a good, long break trying to give it a second chance, but really, it wasn't working. I'm going to keep a lot of the same themes/ideas, but I'm rewriting the entire piece. I'm going to try and get back to the more observatory style that you all seemed to like in Not the Hero.

**CHAPTER ZERO: BEING THE BAD GUY**  
**-THREE DAYS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP-**

Not sure what's going on anymore.

Been on the road for a few days. Never thought it'd be this hard to run away. In the movies they always show some kid finding a hot dog cart to steal from and a nice abandoned industrial building to hole up in until everything blows over. Three days post what she was considering the end of just fucking everything, and she was already thinking about...Well, I need to find a hot dog cart.

What a load of shit.

Didn't really think it through very well. Had that meal card all set up and ready. Could have packed a lunch box while the boys worked on killing-

Bad road, that. Bad road. Dark road. Don't come back from that road.

Fell asleep on a park bench the other day. An old lady left me a sack lunch, but I've got to figure this shit out. _Get your act together kid. Can't go through life with your head up your ass. _

Thanks, Coach.

Mar glared across the street at a little mom and pop coffee shop that she'd been watching for the past two days. She'd seen the little old man come and go, and it was so slow now that...

_Gonna steal from a little old man, Mar? _Shut up.

_Real classy, Zee-zee. And you gave me shit. _God, just shut up.

_Don't do this. You're better than this. _Yeah, I used to be.

_Can't believe you'd do something so stupid_. Like you have room to talk, you murdering-

_Do it. Want to see you do it. _

Mar pushed up off of the bench, watching as the last of the lunch crowd disappeared down the street. The little door bell rang as she tugged on the door, and inside, a wall of coffee and baked goods assailed her nose. There was no chipper or eager barista asking for her order. There was no little old man, either, which was all the better.

She eyed the old fashioned cash register that sat up front on a wooden counter. It was flat black, with a large lever that she'd seen in the movies. She stood at the counter a long moment, staring at the lever that would change everything. A lever that would -

Jesus H. Christ! Mar nearly ran out the door at the clatter and groan that came from back in the kitchen.

_Just take it and go. _

_Yeah, because she's going to listen to anything-_

"Shut up!" She screamed, shaking her head and looking quickly between the register and the kitchen. _Oh, son of a...fine._ She jumped the counter and pushed her way through the double doors into the kitchen.

"Hello?" she called, taking in the spilled tray of muffins strewn across the floor. A little ways off, the old man lay, trying to push himself up using his cane.

"Can you..." He trailed off, gesturing toward the muffins. She ignored him, and gripped his shoulder, heaving him to his feet. He was a tall man, old and bent with age, but as he straightened up to crack his back, she could see what he might have been, once upon a time. He smiled down at her in that fatherly way she'd seen her own dad do time and time again. "Not as easy to get the trays from the oven with a cane," he said, shaking his head.

_And this is the old guy you were going to steal from. _She ignored the voice in her head, the voice that sounded remarkably like-bad road.

"You shouldn't be trying to lift things with one arm while using a cane," she said, stooping down to gather the muffins he'd dropped and toss them into the bin.

"No one here to do it but me," he said. "Unless you're looking for a job?" he asked with a half-hearted laugh.

_Yahtzee. _Zee's head snapped up.

"Yes, I am," she said, standing up with the tray in her hands. "I don't know much about coffee shops-"

"There's not much to know about this coffee shop. This isn't Starbucks," he said, eyeing her up and down. "If you were to work here, there'd be no-"

"I'm in," she said quickly. "I mean...if you were serious about a job." She fidgeted under his gaze. He seemed to see through everything.

"Come on," he said. "I'm Arnold. I was about to have lunch, and then we can get these other trays into the case out front."

_It's gonna get better, Zee-zee. _

God, just shut up.


	2. Psychosis Unwritten

**CHAPTER ONE: PSYCHOSIS UNWRITTEN **

**SIX MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP**

Zee leaned against the counter, drawing circles against the grain of the wood with her finger. Coffee shops had to be the most boring places in existence outside of normal meal hours.

_You're not bored. You're tired._

I'm not tired, mind your own business.

_You haven't slept in three days. _

Because you're such an expert on my sleep patterns.

_I'm the only expert on your sleep patterns._

Fuck. Off. I'm just bored.

"Marietta?" Jesus H. Christ, didn't I tell him? How many times have I told him? Zee. Mar. Anything but Marietta.

"Yes, Arnold?" Don't tell the old man to fuck himself. Don't tell the old man to fuck himself. Don't tell-

"The turnovers should be done," Arnold said easily, staring at her a long moment before giving her a heartbroken little sigh and walking back down the hall to his office. Oh, turnovers...

_What are you so afraid of? I was the worst monster you could find waiting when you closed your eyes, and I'm gone._

You weren't a monster, you just-

_I was the worst thing, Zee. I saw it. You saw it, so what could be so terrifying? _

Just leave me alone. Look, turnovers. God, turnovers. Arnold won't notice if one just-

"Get those in the case, Marietta, and then we can split one," Arnold called into the kitchen. God, I do love you, you wrinkled old curmudgeon.

She slid the tray into the case, plucking a particularly oozing turnover from the case and licking the strawberry filling from her fingers. Working in a coffee shop was hell on her figure, but her pocket book kept her fridge empty enough that it didn't matter. At least she had a fridge now.

"Here, you go, Arnold," Mar said, sliding half the turnover onto a napkin on his desk. She sat down heavily in the chair across from him, taking a bite and blowing puffs of air as the filling scalded her tongue.

"You could wait just a moment," Arnold said.

"Worth it," she huffed before swallowing. "So very worth it." They sat in silence for a long while, both eating their turnovers with a reverence that shouldn't be devoted to food.

"The apartment to your liking?" Arnold asked after a while.

"I keep forgetting there's a step down from the bedroom to the kitchen," Zee said easily. "I've fallen three times since I moved in."

"At least there's been four days where you managed to keep your footing," Arnold teased. "You like it well enough, though?"

"Of course," Zee said, picking at the last few crumbs from her napkin. "It's my first apartment. It could be a box and it would be fantastic."

"You go grocery shopping?" Arnold asked, eyeing her in a way that she'd seen her own father eye her when he knew she was about to lie. Mar just glanced up at him, trying not to smile. "Take one of the sandwiches for your dinner tonight."

"I have food," Mar lied quickly. The old man just frowned at her and shook his head with a sigh.

"There'll be bread dough to make tonight, after closing, if you'd like a few extra hours." Zee nodded before leaving his office.

**-Psychosis Unwritten-**

Caleb sighed, scratching at the back of his neck as he slid his feet off of the side of the bed. He stood up unsteadily, throwing his covers back over his bed before padding quietly out of the room and down the stairs. The hard wood floor was warm in the hall, flooded with sunlight as it came through the glass door. The morning paper lay just inside, and he stooped with a sigh to pick it up.

"Ugh," he groaned as he straightened, back cracking loudly.

Nothing crossed his mind until he settled down on a stool in the kitchen, scratching at his chest aimlessly. The coffee maker was still gurgling. He glared across at it until the dripping stopped and he could pour his first cup. Coffee in hand and a bagel in the toaster, he opened the paper with a happy sigh. There was something to be said for rituals, mundane or otherwise.

He skimmed the funnies, because his brain couldn't handle any of the actual articles without at least two cups of coffee in his system. Beetle Bailey had done something ridiculous again, and he snickered as he spread peanut butter over his still too hot bagel and sipped at his liquid gold. Provisions in hand, he flipped to the front of the paper to read through as methodically as he did every morning.

There was an article about the start of some new money war or another on Wall Street. A village in an African country that he couldn't recall the geographical location to had been attacked by religious supremacists. The further back into the paper he got, the fluffier the stories, and if he was being honest with himself, he needed that fluff. The summer had come and gone quickly, and his first semester of college had been a reality check.

Pogue told him that it was stress. Tyler ignored it. Reid laughed and welcomed him down from Olympus.

Caleb Danvers had failed his first class. Chem 101. He'd taken Honors Chemistry in high school. He'd covered all the material. He already knew it, and still...

59.7%. Professor (call me Doctor) Collins-and there was no irony lost on Caleb there-had refused to give him the seven points it would take to bump his grade to a 60%. A piss poor attempt, but it would have maintained his scholarship. Harvard frowned on failing grades.

A story about some high school student caught his eye for a moment, but it was the article below that that kept his attention.

_Gretta's Cafe is back on the map in a way that has the nostalgic in the greater Boston area dabbing at their eyes. Gretta's Napkin letters are back with a modern flare and a sharper tongue. Keep an eye out for the lady-friendly articles every Tuesday. _

It wasn't so much the cafe or the words that followed. It was the cadence, the tone and the word choice.

_Because he was golden and he was every facet of every responsibility that he had on his shoulders. Shoulders that were too heavy. Shoulders that weren't quite as broad as they looked. Shoulders that took on responsibility where they shouldn't have. Those shoulders picked me up, carried me as if on the wind, and then, when I least felt my feet beneath me, fell away and were simply no longer there. He was Legion. He was many. He was too many, and maybe it was the faith I placed in him that broke his careful balance and let everything tumble to the ground._

It wasn't his name, but it was his _name._ Something that he'd heard from disappeared lips so many times that it felt like home. His coffee sat acrid against his teeth. He made himself swallow against the now too bitter taste as he fumbled to stand up and grope through the pile of discarded newspapers on the end of the counter. The maid only came on Fridays, and he was a creature of habit. The week's worth of newspaper sat at the end of the counter until she came to collect it and take it to recycle.

Four papers settled on the table, all flipped back to the last few pages, where similar announcements were made. Only two others had these so called "Napkin Letters" but it wasn't a settling feeling. Fitzwilliam wasn't Mr. Darcy, but it was close enough for discomfort, and Goldfish was what she'd called Reid so many times that he'd almost adopted the nickname.

Caleb settled down onto his stool again, sinking his head into his hands.

"Fuck," he murmured into the kitchen.

**-Psychosis Unwritten-**

_What the actual fuck are you doing?_

Shut up. It helps. I haven't written anything in-

_But why in the hell would you want to write about them?_

I wrote about you as well.

_But you're practically waxing lyrical over-_

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

_I remember you being more mature than this._

Before I was seeing you and hearing you. Just having you in my head is seriously damaging my calm. Just please, be quiet.

Mar stared blankly down at the notebook in front of her. Somewhere along the line, the page had filled up and Chase had started picking at the back of her mind. It started after she'd left Ipswich, and the more she thought about them, the louder their voices in her head. For a few days, she'd thought about checking herself into a nut house. She might have, if she'd not seen everything she'd seen. She sighed, pushing the notebook away and standing up from the small desk in the corner of her smaller apartment. Catching the step just before she stumbled down it, she rubbed at her wrists. They ached, burned really. She'd been writing longer than she'd thought, but then...

God, that burns.

She rubbed at her elbows, up into her shoulders and down across her ribs and chest. Defined, burning lines criss-crossed her skin, down her hips and around her legs to her feet.

_Chase?_ She called in her mind, but the man was oddly silent. God...

She was on fire. Surely, this was death, this agonizing fire searing across her flesh. She stumbled to the bathroom, threw the shower on and stepped beneath the freezing spray. Goose flesh raised along her arms, and still she burned on. Dark, blistering lines ran in familiar whorls and swirls up her hands and arms. She'd seen them before. How could she forget those sworls?

_Pogue?_ She called in her mind, but she couldn't hear anyone respond over the screaming.

She woke up in the bottom of the shower, body aching and sore, but the burning had stopped.

_God, Zee, I swear I didn't..._

_Shut up. She doesn't need you here._

"Stop," she murmured into the water. She didn't have the strength to sit upright and turn off the spray. "Please, just stop," she begged again, and silence followed.


	3. Napkin Letters - Part One

**CHAPTER TWO: NAPKIN LETTERS PART I**

**SIX MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP TO SEVEN MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP**

_Some men are like birds, preening and primping in the sunlight, drawing attention with flashing colors and sharp cries. Others are like wolves, dangerous and sharp, strong in their own group but weak alone, just not enough on their own. I had never met a man that was a fish before him, and I will never meet another of his like. Love like a river. Feeling like an ocean. Air made up of affection. In those moments, when someone was there, and whole and loved him, he could breath. He drew breath and just shined, sending the sun off of his scales in glistening shimmers of golds and oranges and yellows. _

_When he was alone, he drowned. He suffocated. He gasped for air, his eyes growing dim, his balance uneven. He couldn't swim straight and he floundered, trying to eek out an existence until someone else came along. Someone else brought him air and life and love. I used to make him shine like that. Is it wrong to hope he's drowning? _

-Napkin Letters-

_He was a wall. An unforgiving wall._

_He used to protect, standing between myself and the world, and wasn't it just the most comforting thing to have him there? Always there, stalwart and strong and just enough of a danger to be truly able. I didn't really know how much I relied on that quiet strength until it was turned against me. _

_Until I threw myself against that wall, and it took my weight, un-moving and unforgiving, and turned me away. Until that wall kept me from what was mine. Until it took its own will and imposed it upon the world around it. And wasn't that what that very wall had done all along? _

_Wasn't its protection just another barrier? a hindrance to some other force? _

_He was a wall. An un-forgiven wall. _

-Napkin Letters-

_I trusted him more than I should have, more than anyone should. Because he was golden and he was every facet of responsibility. I trusted him because if you couldn't trust such an all encompassing thing, such a limitless capacity, what could you ever really trust? And because of that trust, he was simply no longer what he'd been. _

_Because he was golden and he was every facet of every responsibility that he had upon his shoulders. Shoulders that were too heavy. Shoulders that weren't quite as broad as they looked. Shoulders that took responsibility where they shouldn't have. Those shoulders picked me up, carried me as if on the wind, and then, when I least felt my feet beneath me, fell away and were simply no longer there. He was Legion. He was many. He was too many, and maybe it was the faith I placed in him that broke his careful balance and let everything tumble to the ground. _

_Maybe he hates me for that, for breaking his world down around his ears. Wouldn't that be something? Then again, maybe I hate him, for doing the same to me._

-Napkin Letters-

_Fitzwilliam is a stiff name, full of pomp and circumstance, and that's what he was, too cool and stiff. Like an icicle in the dead of winder, with some small creature at its heart, a fly that had held out through winter long enough to land in the wrong bit of ice for just too long. Just like that icicle, he thaws, and that fly falls to the ground, where the sun can warm it. It will never live again. _

_Sometimes I wonder if he caught me in that ice, that chill and suspension of life. Am I laying on the ground, dead but warmed by the sun? Am I alive? _

_If I am, maybe I was never really caught in the chill of him, the promise of warmth of him. Maybe I just buzzed by, appreciating the crystalline beauty of the ice and moved on. _

_Maybe I'm dead though. It's that I'm not really sure that is the true tragedy. _


	4. My Kingdom for a Dreamless Sleep

**CHAPTER THREE: MY KINGDOM FOR A DREAMLESS SLEEP**

**SEVEN MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP**

Mar sighed into the nothingness that was the coffee shop. Arnold had long ago left her for the plush easy chair in his office.

_Old bones._

Shut up.

_Listen, I swear I didn't mean-_

_Leave her alone! You ruin everything you touch all of you ju-_

Shut up!

"Marietta?" Zee flinched at her name. Arthur stood in the doorway to the kitchen. "The timer on the muffins went off five minutes ago. I've shut them off, but I can't-"

"I've got it," Zee said, slipping around him through the door. Inside, the kitchen was hot, and the heat made the blisters along her arms ache as she pulled on oven mitts and drew the racks from the oven. She'd been trying to avoid the kitchen heat for the past three days, but with Arnold unable to really lift the trays from the oven, her best laid plans had gone awry.

The heat off of the trays burned at her arms, despite the thick layer of Neosporin and gauze that she'd padded them with. Her hands ached inside the oven mitts, the blisters straining and sore. She had popped most of them, annoyed with the wet splotches that they made on her clothes if they did it on their own. Yet still, new formed and popped and burned and the blackened flesh flaked off. Three times in the past hour Arnold had looked at her with those eyes that spoke more than he did. Three times in the past hour he'd asked her if she was alright. Three times in the past hour she'd lied.

It had just kept repeating, this cycle of burning and blistering and scarring. She'd thought about seeing a doctor, but physicians were expensive.

_What would you tell them anyway? My psychotic friends did a satanic ritual to send a dead man to hell, and I think I'm being-_

Just shut up, Chase.

_I'm not being an asshole, Zee. You walked in on them banishing a soul to hell. You think this is all just going to go away?_

_You can't ignore someone that's in your head. _

I can too. Just leave me alone.

_As much as it pains me to suggest, you have a resource for these things. _

No, I don't.

"Marietta?" Arnold startled her from staring into the depths of one of the ovens, the rolling heat stinging along her collar bones.

"Yeah Arnold?" She snapped the oven door closed and turned, busying herself with running a flat spatula beneath each of the baked goods, freeing them from the cooling tins. The molds. She'd been molded, hadn't she?

"You don't look well," he said, his voice that heavy ring around her neck that brought her from the clouds and back into her aching flesh.

_Even old and gassy can see that-_

Shut up, Chase.

"I'm fine, just didn't sleep well last night," she said, scratching absently at one of the healing scars against her hip wherer it was healing.

"Get everything into the case, and I'm going to send you home," he said. Mar considered fighting him for a moment, but the ache in her arms and the fatigue in her was convincing. She'd been unable to sleep through a night in the month since the burns first appeared.

Her apartment wasn't baren, but it wasn't something that anyone would have been proud up. On the fifth floor of a walk up, she had a rousing view of the brick wall of another building, but it was an interesting layout, with a split level floor and a set of double doors into her bedroom and bathroom. The fridge was nearly empty except for a big tub of yogurt and a head of lettuce, but she had a fridge now, and that was saying something, considering the place had been empty when she'd rented it. There was a bed for her to sleep in, an old salvation army thing that squawked when she sat upon it, an armchair that gave just as much annoyed complaint when it was used, and a card table that the woman at the salvy had given her for free with a look of pity and two folding chairs. Independence was difficult, especially for a high school drop out.

The bed gave a great creaking groan as she collapsed down onto it, and sleep came not long after.

**-MY KINGDOM FOR A DREAMLESS SLEEP-**

Pogue wasn't naturally an anxious person, or one that snapped at his friends for expressing concern. Grounded concern. Not even he could dismiss the way he'd been acting lately. The sleeplessness was the cause, he was certain. The dreams that haunted him every time he closed his eyes were becoming unbearable.

At first, it was just Chase, just the loud mouthed asshole of the year in chains against some soot covered brick wall. The inky blackness seemed to smear across him at the wrists and ankles, where he was bound, where they'd bound him to the bed. That hadn't been so terrible, not really. What came after though, was harder to swallow down in the night.

The chains started a dull red where they attached to the wall, just a faint glowing of hot metal until it crept down and touched his skin. The scars that criss crossed his arms and chest and disappeared down into the blackened sweat pants that he wore were familiar, and they too turned red and blistered. At first, the dream ended there. Chase made no noise, he didn't even look up as his skin blistered and sloughed away.

After the first few weeks, it changed.

He would simply look up, his lips quirked in a smile, staring right into Pogue like he could see the heart of him. That only lasted a few days, and even then, Chase didn't seem in pain.

_"You know what you're doing?" he asked, those half-crazed eyes flickering back and forth between Pogue and the world around them, a world that had been dark just moments before._

_Hell should have been darker. Pogue wished it was darker. _

_There was a sun, hot and blistering overhead, making everything a dull orangish on top of the soot stained grey that was everything. Some movies depict hell like a prison or a jail, others like the destroyed earth. Hell wasn't either of those things. It was simply a void, a void where nothing connected and everything was made up of small, floating scenes of individual suffering. _

_On some of those little islands, human faces turned toward him with wide eyes; on others, those faces had dcayed down to charred demons that made even Pogue's spine shiver. One of the little demons lept from its island to Chase's, and as its hoofed feet touched the ground, the chains turned red, burning toward his skin until the creature was pressed up against his side. It slid right into him, beneath the flesh and the skin, seeming to disappear into Chase until his skin blistered and boiled and the greyness that had enveloped him poured out from the wounds like steam, upward and away from them. _

_"You see what you're doing?" Chase asked, that smile in place._

Every night for a month he woke up that way, pouring sweat and thinking about the grey smoke that seemed to escape from Chase and into the world. It was three months after that the dream changed. It was three months after that he stopped wanting to sleep.

_He crouched down in front of the last son of Ipswich, staring at him. Chase hadn't looked up to meet his eyes in days, and instead, sat with his head bowed as a new creature lept onto his little island. The chains started with their redness, and as Pogue ducked his head to be able to see Chase's face, he nearly fell over backward. _

_Eyes shut tight against anything that might try and find purchase in his mind, jaw clenched and ticking, Chase was the opposite of the calm and amused person he'd been a few weeks ago. The corners of his eyes were wet, but the heat rid his cheeks of everything but the salt from the tears that had already fallen. _

_"You don't see what you're doing," he whispered under his breath. "You're going to kill her."_

For several days, the dreams ended there, with Chase whispering brokenly at him, as if he knew he was there without looking. Since, they'd only gotten worse. Some nights, Chase simply sat there, staring up at him with wide, accusing eyes. Others, he laughed until he choked. Yet others, he whispered the name of a girl, soothing and shushing, trying to talk her through something.

It was six months after they'd done the ritual that she first appeared. Tied to that wall instead of Chase, eyes closed and head lolling to one side in sleep. The chains turned red, but no matter how he tried to pull them from her skin or keep the snarling demon at bay, it slipped into her, burned through her flesh, and left her scarred and whimpering. Every night, she woke a few moments before him, just staring at him with hollow, miserable eyes. Her lips formed words, but he was awake before he could hear them.


	5. Napkin Letters - Part Two

**CHAPTER FOUR: NAPKIN LETTERS - PART TWO**

**EIGHT MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP TO TEN MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP**

He is a wild thing. There is a poem that starts with: I've never seen a wild thing sorry for itself. I have never seen him sorry for himself. I have seen him sad and enraged. I have seen him lost and on occasion happy. I have seen him despondant and sorry for his actions. I have never seen him sorry for himself.

He has done things, things that he is not proud of, in the name of strength. Men always do, don't they? Silence is strength. Firmness is strength. Power is strength. Except, when he had that power and silence and unrelenting will, he was at his weakest. It was then that I met him, and I have never been more conflicted about a person in my life.

He has lost that strength though, learned that it is a false thing, a lie. He has learned what strength really is by not having any, by simply being what he is at his core, once everything else has been burned away. It is that center that is a wild thing. It is that center that is beautiful.

**-NAPKIN LETTERS - PART TWO-**

He does things that others will not do, and he does them with a sort of easy grace and pride that it is almost impossible to see the effects that doing so has upon him. At first, I didn't see it, those cracks in the wall that he was, the dam that held back all the bad in the world, that tried, at least. I think that wall is crumbling, slowly every day. I think that it has had such great strain placed upon it that it will be less and less until it is simply a pebble in the road, no longer able to protect the things he'd like.

Except walls can be rebuilt. They can be fortified and strengthened. Once, I wanted to tear him down, to leap beyond his protecting and restricting nature and leave it crumbling behind me. I was angry once. Now that I have passed beyond him, I hope that he is found by some brickmason or engineer, someone that can build him up better than he was before. Because, whose fault is it really? Is it the fault of wall for standing there, for doing what it does? Or is it the fault of those that would hide behind it, let it protect them, and not climb over it or simply open the door and step through?

I was too afraid once. I don't think anything scares me anymore.

**-NAPKIN LETTERS - PART TWO-**

I called him the winter because it was easier than seeing he was the spring. Still chilly and wet, annoying but needed. He had the bite of December but the heart of May. Maybe I didn't want to see it because I wanted everything to be black and white, uncomplicated and easy. Nothing ever is.

There was a promise to him, an energy and a potential that could be great, would be great, once he decided to thaw the rest of the way, to let that warmth ease from deep within him and out into his bones. I was still a child, and I only liked the summer. I didn't see the beauty in winter or the promise in a cold rainy spring morning. I'd like to think that I've gotten older, that I've learned.

I can see the beauty in the snow now, the necessity of the barren nights. I can even see the darkness in the summer, the evil in it. He showed me that, but he showed me a lot of things that I had never thought I would see. A world that is vividly colorful, that is right and wrong. Where everyone is a hero. Where everyone is a villain.

**-NAPKIN LETTERS - PART TWO-**

There is a greatness to being untouchable, to acting the part, but it is a cold greatness, a hollow feeling of lonliness that I think he felt so keenly that it spurred him to try to play the part even more. I watched him do it time and time again, play off a truth as a lie, flirt with disappointment and ignore desires. I hadn't ever seen him take anything he really wanted. I watched him take things he didn't, things that others expected him to want, but the things that he looked at differently, as though they held some greater meaning, he avoided.

Maybe he thought that he would ruin them, that they were best kept away and watched from a distance, like a delicate painting in a museum. Except those paintings, locked up and behind thick glass, aren't truly appreciated for what they are at their core. The overarching themes are seen, but not the little brush strokes that make something turly beautiful. Those need to be seen up close, lived and breathed and loved. Maybe I'm doing the same thing. Maybe I want things that I shouldn't, so I avoid them and put them away from myself because at least away they can not be hurt-they cannot hurt me.

**-NAPKIN LETTERS - PART TWO-**

There is nothing so beautiful as confidence, and nothing so heart-breaking as self-control. He was, when I first met him, all of one. The last time I saw him, he was all the other. In the time between, I saw him in every facet of what he was, every character trait, both the positive and the flaws. I saw how he looked at the people he loved. I saw how he protected them, put his back to whatever danger they faced and tried to take the blow for them.

Because he was the responsible one. He was the eldest of a family, and hadn't I heard from my father too many times to not know what that meant? It was a heavy thing, the weight placed upon his shoulders. I thought he'd crumbled beneath it. I thought he'd dropped me because I was too heavy a weight with the rest, that I was expendable.

He didn't drop me. I jumped, and he let me. He gave me the space to walk on my own, to see how far and how fast I could run. He controlled himself well enough not to chase after for spite or anger or need in the hopes that I would be strong enough, in the hopes that I would not betray his trust. Because it was trust to let me fall, let me go. When I met him, I was all of one thing; now, I'd like to think I'm all of the other.


	6. Scream So I Can't Hear You

**CHAPTER FIVE: SCREAM SO I CAN'T HEAR YOU**

**TWELVE MONTHS POST BIG DAMN SCREW UP**

_Come on, please just talk to me._

The dreams kept her from sleeping most nights, and if they weren't enough, waking with searing pain as the sun rose was enough to make her never want to again. It didn't matter though. If she slept, she woke up branded again. If she didn't, she got to feel the heat slowly build until it seared through her skin and into her very soul.

It made her sick, physically and mentally, and it was only the cafe that got her out of bed in the mornings.

_You can't ignore me anymore, Virus; I won't let you. _

"Mariette, why don't you take a break, sit down for a bit with me and eat something?" Arnold asked from the door of his office. Zee had been washing the front of the bakery display cases for the better part of an hour. Her knees ached with more than the normal burn now, and she was almost startled to find that she hadn't moved past the first bit.

The glass was crystalline clear, not smudged or flecked with dust like the rest. She felt at peace for a moment, looking at the work in front of her. That peace evaporated as she looked to the rest of the display. There was work to be done, and yet...she'd gone somewhere else inside her head.

"I'm not hungry, Arnold," she said, sliding over to work at another bit of glass. She scrubbed a new spot with each stroke, making her mind stay focused on the task. It was far more difficult than it should have been.

_Jesus, I've never been more pathetic in my life; just talk to me. _

She sat in the bottom of her shower, the water cold and the pipes singing in annoyance at having to work so early in the morning. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she stared resolutely at her wrists and ankles. There, where the scars were their thickest and where Chase had been bound to the bed, the blisters were _wrong_.

They were thick black things, oozing a sort of tar that dripped from her skin like slugs before turning to smoke in the space between her skin and the tub bottom. She'd lost her mind. She'd let this get to her for so long that her overactive imagination was playing havoc with her eyesight.

"I'm going insane," she whispered into the water.

Slowly, the blisters cleared, and in the wake of the inky blackness was only the usual pink skin and occasional clear white blister.

_I'm going to make them fix this, Zee. I promise I'm going to make them fix this. _

The fact that her mind had gone silent should have made her feel better. Having Chase constantly bickering with her thoughts had been exhausting, and hearing Pogue's whispered apologies was almost more so. Now that they'd been gone for a couple of months, it was almost...lonely.

At least with Chase around, she could ask him about the mornings, between total darkness and true sunrise, the twilight of the morning hours. He'd have had some quick witted pun or an explanation that made her feel silly. He'd have at least given her someone to talk to, someone to assure her she wasn't crazy.

But Chase was gone. In the quiet hours at night when she tried not to sleep, she thought maybe his soul had finally found peace. The first time she'd thought that, she'd laughed herself to tears. Chase was bound to hell. He'd told her that often enough. Perhaps he'd simply accepted his fate, let himself sink into the inky pit and had left her alone.

**-SCREAM SO I CAN'T HEAR YOU-**

Pogue was losing his god damned mind. He'd ascended. Reid had ascended. Tyler had ascended. They were all doing moderately well in college, and yet...

He'd lost it.

The dreams were a constant now, playing through on a loop several times a night. It was never Chase anymore, always Mar, and she was awake from start to finish almost half the time. Except she never spoke to him, never said anything, and for a little while, it was just her and the inky black things osmosing into her through the chains and out through her skin in popping blisters of smoke.

Chase had been there for the last few weeks, screaming something at him from only a few feet away, trying to walk toward them both but only succeeding in taking sluggish lunges, his feet sinking deeper and deeper into the earth below them. Once or twice, he fixed Pogue with a look that had to _mean_ something more than anger, and gestured toward Marietta as if Pogue should do something.

It was last night's dream that made him want to call Caleb. He stared down at the phone in his hand, Caleb's number queued up and waiting for him to jab at it. He hadn't realized he'd done so until Caleb was shouting at him through the receiver.

"Yeah, yeah, man, I'm here," he said, bringing the phone to his ear. He was certifiable. He was fucking deluded. He was-

"You alright?" The question threw him a moment.

"Why wouldn't I be?" he asked on instinct.

"It's five in the morning, man." His eyes flickered to the clock. Of course it was. "Jesus, Pogue, the sun's not even up yet, and I have that Chem II exam in the morning."

"I think I killed Zee," he said, cutting off the meaningless prattle that only came about when sleep was chased away too early from Caleb's lips. It was silent for a long time, and Pogue took the phone away from his ear a moment to check that the call was still connected. Silence. The little call tracker ticked by for fifteen more seconds before he could hear Caleb again.

"What?" It was only one word, but the tone of it, the weight of it, was so much more.

"I keep...I'm having these dreams, man, but they didn't ever amount to much until tonight. I don't...I think I'm losing my mind. It's the power, or it's Chase. I can't have..." He couldn't finish the statement, not again. He pinched his eyes shut tightly against reality.

_Chase was standing only three feet away from him, but unlike usual, the other man didn't flail at him or scream. He simply stared sullenly at the girl that sat at their feet, chained to the wall. None of the demons had leapt to their little island yet, but it was only a matter of time. Pogue could almost feel it in his bones. _

_"She's going to die because of us." The words startled him. There was always only silence in the dreams lately, and he hadn't been able to hear Chase before. The words had been whispered, barely breathed into the air, and yet Pogue had heard them, clear as if they'd been his own. __He turned to Chase. _

_"Is this real?" His words were choked and quiet. _

_"Real enough," Chase said. His eyes flickered up after that, his entire posture changing, face a study of shock and relief. "She's in Boston. Find her. Fix this or I swear I'll wait until I'm burned out and nothing more than those things and I'll use her to find you." The words had started soft, near whispers, and by the end, Pogue could tell Chase was shouting. There were more words spit past his lips, but Pogue couldn't hear them. _

"Pogue!" Caleb's voice startled him, and he nearly dropped the phone. Shaking his head, he blinked tiredly, trying to dispel the memory from his mind. "Jesus, Pogue, what the hell was that?"

"Sorry, man I just spaced out for a—"

"If that was you playing at scaring each other like when we were kids, man, I give up."

The words were shaky, jarring and wrong.

"You saw that," he said. It wasn't a question. Nothing else could turn Caleb from annoyed to that shaken in the length of...he checked the timer on his phone. Ten minutes?

"Go home this weekend. I'll call Tyler and Reid. We need to check on Chase." Chase Collins. Pogue hated him, but every night, watching him and Marietta had softened him a bit. It was almost palpable the way that Chase worried every time the chains turned red. Chase Collins had been someone like that once, Pogue knew, someone lost and worried and afraid like he was on that little island in a sea of orange-tinted grey.

When they'd shackled his soul to hell, they'd thought the body would go with it. Unfortunately for them, it had remained, laying on the bed and breathing, heart beat slow but firm. Gorman now stood vigil over a different body that clung to life far longer than it should.

"Pogue, you hear me?" Caleb asked, voice thick with responsibility, with worry, with something else that was a little too sharp for Pogue to brush off.

"What do you know?" he asked before he even knew he was going to speak.

"I'll show you when—"

"Caleb, what do you know?"

"I know where Zee is," he said after a long pause. "She's been writing for a paper in Boston, but—"

"Boston," Pogue said, a little snorting sound escaping after. "I'll meet you at the colony house Friday night. I'm leaving now."

"You can't skip your classes."

"I'm not the one that failed Chem I, Caleb. I can miss a few classes, and if I wait until Friday, I won't get there until early Sunday." It was true enough. They'd all gone their separate ways for college, and while Pogue would always love the east coast, California had called his name after senior year, mostly because it was as far as he could get away from his parents and Kate.

"Friday night," Caleb said.

"I'll wait until sundown, Caleb, but if anyone's late, I'm going on my own."

"I'll be there," Caleb assured. "I'm sure the others will be." Tyler and Reid hadn't stayed as close as Caleb, but they'd not fled the entire eastern half of the country either. Tyler was a sophomore at the University of Chicago with a perfect 4.0 in biochemistry that had shocked all of them. Reid had proudly proclaimed himself a Women's Studies major at Tulane University his freshman year. It hadn't taken any of them half a minute to figure out why, and it had only taken half a year for him to change his major to Business, per his mother's wishes. He'd been taking more English courses than anyone ever thought he would though, especially after he slept through most of it in high school.

Pogue didn't even try to sleep again. He waited for the sun to come up, packed his backpack and the bags on his bike, and went east.


End file.
